The setting of Barbara Kingsolver's Pulitzer-winning novel Demon Copperhead is Appalachia.
Published in 2022, Demon Copperhead is narrated by Damon Fields, whose nickname gives the novel its title. He grows up in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia amid poverty, unstable housing, foster care, school difficulties, and opioid addiction.
The novel is a modern reworking of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. Kingsolver preserves the earlier novel's orphaned-child perspective and episodic journey while relocating the story to a contemporary Appalachian community. The adaptation makes regional poverty and the opioid crisis central to the narrative.
Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023, sharing the award with Hernan Diaz's Trust. It also won the Women's Prize for Fiction. Appalachia is a broad cultural and geographic region, not a single state; in the novel, the landscape and social conditions of southwest Virginia shape Damon's life and voice.